Using Notepad to Format Your Web Page

One way to create and edit Web pages on your own computer is to use a text editor, such as NotePad, which lets you format your page using HTML tags.

Using NotePad to work in HTML, you enter your text, add HTML tags for markup, save the file, and then open it in Internet Explorer or another Web browser. What you see when you view your HTML code in IE will truly be what users will get when they view the same Web page in the same Web browser.

When following the steps here, and in other uses of Notepad, don’t open WordPad instead of Notepad. WordPad stores its own hidden formatting codes among the text characters you type, just like Word (but without most of the nice features).

Follow these steps to get started using Notepad as an HTML-editing tool:

1Click the Start button. Choose Start→Programs→Accessories→Notepad.

Notepad opens.

2Click Save & Continue. Save your document under any name you choose, but use the .htm suffix.

The file will be saved as a text file, with no formatting codes; the suffix .htm signals to your Web browser (and, after you upload your file, to Web servers and so on) that the file is a Web page.

Right-clicking on a file and choosing Properties will reveal the file’s suffix.

3Pull down the Format menu and click Font.

The Notepad Format menu works differently from any Format menu in any other program you’re likely to use. It changes the way all the text in the currently open file looks on-screen — regardless of whether that text is selected at the time you choose the Format command — and includes options you can apply to text. Options include changing the Font and making text Bold, Italic, or Underlined.

If you open your Notepad text file on a different machine, it will display using the font, font style, and size in use by that copy of Notepad, neither knowing nor caring what settings you were using in the copy of Notepad you last edited the file in.